My attempt to explain a country with the population density of the Netherlands and the urban choices of Arlington, Texas, who also happens to care about inclusion and ends up bringing kids to school in taxis and giving cars to 860,000 disabled people because that's the only way to give autonomy

These are the conversations the UK still refuses to have.

My preface to the UK budget in The Conversation about three things no one is talking about: the Covid debt, the energy support scheme, and Brexit. Three political choices that we treat as shocks and refuse to discuss to avoid sounding awkward. theconversation.com/the-three-sp...

I wrote about electricity prices in the UK in @uk.theconversation.com theconversation.com/why-electric...

- high gas prices have driven up the price of electricity - consumers pay surcharges on their bills to develop renewables - renewables lower the price of electricity - nuclear is complicated - The UK has less sun than Spain. Me in @uk.theconversation.com theconversation.com/why-electric...

People love to be in control. They also love to take credit for success and blame others for failures. When we offer subjects a chance to delegate to a lottery that might pick their choice or someone else's, they stop being control freaks (1/6) (in econ letters) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

So, here in sunny Lancaster, we have this rockstar student on the market this year. Before him, the world thought that increasing the number of economic graduates (the best paid ones) should strongly decrease their salaries. Joseph shows it is not the case. (1/3)

I'm happy to share my job market paper. It asks a simple but classic question: to what extent are graduate wages affected by the supply of graduate labour in the economy? 🧵

The world is ageing - what can we learn from Europe's difficulties to make an old world a happy one? Me, in TIME time.com/7320745/boom...

I guess it's time to open Thomas Schelling again! What should Europe (and the US???) do to get us closer to peace as Russia is probing attacks on Eastern Europe? Four points. (1/7)

Yes, François Bayrou precipitated his own downfall, but at least the 74-year old outgoing PM broached the politically explosive topic of how boomers benefit above the odds from the French state, argues @lancasteruni.bsky.social’s @rfoucart.bsky.social 🇫🇷 Full itw ⤵️ f24.my/BPzV

I wrote on a paradox of the latest Google ruling: as time passes, even illegal monopolies disappear because of innovation. Monopolies may actually encourage radical innovation. But this also means zero accountability for those who break the rules. theconversation.com/google-avoid...

Perhaps the one absolute success of 14 years of Conservative party rule in the UK will be claimed by no one www.ons.gov.uk/employmentan...

How can central banks deliver difficult messages when politicians say they're "morons"? With difficulty... because people don't like listening to outsiders. Lagarde has more difficulty reaching Italians and Draghi (and vice versa) My @financialtimes.com newsletter ft.com/content/2082...

To benefit from advice, you need to follow advice first! Our experiment on chess players and why a world democratising access to expertise will not necessarily be a more equal one, is now published in JEBO. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We were lucky enough to have our YouGov/The Economist poll in field when the US bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. You can see the partisan realignment in real time

In this piece, I very strongly argue that I have no strong views on whether spending £14bn on a new nuclear reactor is a good idea. But I try to make what I think is the best possible case for it. theconversation.com/nuclear-ener...

I wrote in @uk.theconversation.com about the price of everything and our aversion to talk about tradeoffs. (in the context of the UK's review of its green book to evaluate public investments) theconversation.com/where-should...

Completely lost at the "AI means everyone is cheating at University" discourse. I teach in 2 universities, we have in-person invigilated exams. AI can help for coursework but it's our job as teacher to still make the work useful. What is the problem exactly? Have some places no exam anymore?

I love you, @theguardian.com, I truly do. But could you not refrain from those regular pieces "champagne reduce risk of cardic arrest," "coffee is good for you." All it would take is one employee with basic training in causal inference with a veto right. Please. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

I used to believe some people were angry at the use of lotteries in school choice for selfish reasons -- in the hope of gaming the system or keeping segregated schools. Our paper, now out in Games and Economic Behavior, tells the story of how I was at least partly wrong: (1/11)

If you ever felt bad for a mistake in your exam questions, the 10,000-candidate EU translator exam is cancelled because they set a multiple choice questionnaire as a multiple answer

m.youtube.com/watch?v=elSe... Spoke to fr24 about the new "people against the judges" country: France

@theguardian.com has a very long explanation of why the UK got the 10% tariff and why it is genius diplomacy without even mentioning it was applied the exact same (x-m)/2m formula as everyone else www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I am hiring a Junior Economics Researcher at UPF Barcelona. Please apply if you are interested macro, market power, labor euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/332002 #EconJobs #AcademicJobs #Economics #JobAlert

Playing it nice and giving enough rope for the US admin to climb down, or going nuclear with the EU anti coercion instrument and ending US intellectual property right? Me in The Conversation: theconversation.com/how-the-uk-a...

Having an office in Ireland will become, more than ever, the place to be for fiscal optimization. Pay RoI tax. Send to NI via Windsor framework. Export to the US at 10%.

I don't know if tariff retaliation with the US is good or useful, but in a post WTO world, the most obvious sector to tax without hurting domestic producers is digital services: Amazon, Google, Meta, ... not car parts and industrial components. Might also be politically astute.

If procrastination was a country

Economists: people don't understand marginal tax. If your tax rate increases above £100,000, you don't suddenly lose money when you earn £100,001 UK tax system: hold my beer www.ft.com/content/8fc5...

Just published in @jpube.bsky.social: "OK Boomer: Generational differences in teacher quality" By Nhu Nguyen, Ben Ost, & Javaeria A. Qureshi www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #econsky

ok: who is running the audit study in which a student not even from your university requests entire departments to sign a pre-filled reference letter?

The FT is London based. Not showing the results from England but for countries all going in the same direction instead is a deliberate choice - sad , I love the ft

This is a pretty remarkable set of results. I got fixated on adults in this, since it seems like a big change! One fact that I discovered by digging into the original reports is that this masks some pretty interesting heterogeneity: www.oecd.org/en/publicati...

It would be funny if puns reached new heights of popularity as a sort of pidgin language for fooling robots

I had no idea that before Shakespeare, the moral of Romeo and Juliet was that those little bastards should have listened to their parents instead of doing disgusting things and buying avocado toasts (From Sophie Duncan's Searching for Juliet)

💥New 💥 IZA Discussion Paper! 🔵 What happens when 140+ teams of economists perform the same research three times, each time with less freedom? ✅ Find out here! www.iza.org/publications... ✅ This is a "Many-Economists" project led by Huntington-Klein & Pörtner. Read Nick's post below to learn more!👇

Seems switching to authoritarianism is a form of billionaire tax

Let's be clear. Buying American weapons is a real risk to European security at this point due to political interference. Actually, it's an issue to anyone in the world relying on top US military equipment. Cc @jakluge.de

Cyrano de Bergerac. They have invented Cyrano de Bergerac.

You can do Orbanism (Proj 2025) or Mileiism (DOGE) but you can't do both

Imagine... a world where the CMA did not block the Meta/Giphy deal. The endless possibilities. Lots of gifs... on the metaverse

theconversation.com/ukraine-war-... Just wrote this in @uk.theconversation.com about why I think abandoning Ukraine would lead to global nuclear proliferation

Will European media and politicians engage with what Merz has to say about Europe and strategic autonomy, or will they spend most of their analysis in their usual comfort zone of "what does it say about the unstoppable rise of the far right"?

US: Should we end NATO and ally with Russia instead? UK: Is a £40 handbag too big of an expense for a banker? Germany: If FDP and BSW are both above 5%, will CDU-SPD need to expand to Grune? France: Should girls be allowed to wear a headscarf when playing amateur basketball?

Imagine believing we can colonize Mars but thinking it's impossible to replace plastic straws

AI: claim to replace humans, used mostly for bad taste images and deepfake videos, billion dollar investment holes Beavers: actually replacing human labour, saving costs, amazing tales

www.theguardian.com/technology/2... Breaching GDPR to target users with gambling ads. I'm not always sure about how tight consent requirements should be, but this is really bad

As everything is about Large Language Models now, why don't we see universities massively investing in language degrees and students signing up? Understanding language must be THE key skill to get what's going on?

The sudden and illegal elimination of all US aid personnel worldwide immediately reduces US soft power. It makes Americans less secure, everywhere. Economists have shown that pro- and anti-American attitudes are directly shaped by aid given in time of need.